Visual Skills for Lacrosse: Speed of Recognition

Optometrist Dr. Robert Buonfiglio checks in with ILGear to discuss the speed of visual recognition within the fastest game on two feet.

By Robert A. Buonfiglio, O.D.

Visual Skills for Lacrosse – Speed of Recognition

I remember the first time I attended a Boston Cannons game. Prior to that time, I had only seen lacrosse live at the youth level or on TV at the college level. What most struck me was that things can happen so fast that, even if you were paying close attention, they seem to be beyond your capability to follow them. When the MLL games began to be televised, I would see plays that were just too fast to follow, even when shown on slow-motion instant replay!

So we know that lacrosse is a fast game. But can we train our visual systems to keep up with it?

Training Our Eyes to Keep Up With a Fast Game

One of the skills that is needed in lacrosse, or in any other fast-moving activity, for that matter (including driving a car) is speed of recognition, which is the ability to locate an object, see it in some level of detail, and derive its meaning. I’ll use the driving example: as you’re driving, you see something coming from your right. You make a quick saccadic eye movement (remember those?), and perceive that it’s a lacrosse ball. You then realize that a kid could be chasing it, and while slowing down, you look to see if someone runs into the street. Then you recall that your typical lacrosse player knows better than to run into the street without looking, though you might not be able to say that about all types of athletes.

The time it took you to recognize the object indicates your speed of recognition, and it can be trained rather easily, though it takes a bit of time and focused effort.

What’s a Tachistoscope?

Most of the equipment we use to improve speed of recognition uses a simple concept: present a target for a very short time, then see if you can describe what you saw. It can be a picture, an array of letters, numbers, etc. They’re called tachistoscopes. At one time they were slide projectors with camera shutters to provide a short view of a slide; but now we use digital versions, and you can even find free versions online.

In the example, you can see a six-digit number, displayed for one tenth of a second (or 100 milliseconds, as we commonly measure the times.)

After one or two tries, you will be able to recognize the number. We increase the difficulty by shortening the time of display, increasing the number of characters, placing the characters at different locations on the screen, or by inserting a distracting image for a specific time, to delay the point at which you respond (forcing you to store the image in memory.)

In “T-scope” training, we can go down to sixty milliseconds (six hundredths of a second) or less, with the result that the times that seemed so fast at the start of training now seem slow by comparison. By training recognition, you can begin to understand what we mean when we say that vision training helps to “slow the game down.” We haven’t really slowed the game down, we’ve sped up your ability to pick up visual information, process it, and produce an accurate response. (How cool is that?)

Example From Lacrosse

You’ve just snagged a ground ball. You look up and see a teammate. Is there a clear lane to pass? If not, you look for another teammate; there’s an opening, but is he looking like he’s ready for it? Meanwhile, you’ve got a long pole about to slam down on you from one side, and you’re half a step from going out of bounds.

The sooner you can recognize what’s happening, the sooner you can make the right play.

If you have questions you would like answered in this column, please send them to me at one of the email addresses below.

Dr. Robert Buonfiglio “Dr. B.” is an optometrist in the Boston area, working - along with optician and coach Gary Kalloch - in the area of Sports Vision: the testing and training of the visual skills of athletes, with the goal of improving on-field performance. They have participated in lacrosse goalie clinics with lax-school.com, under the direction of former Boston Cannons head coach Bill Daye. Dr. B can be reached at r.buonfiglio@comcast.net or info@eyeonperformance.net. The website for Eye on Performance is www.eyeonperformance.net.

A view of the tachistoscope program we use in our facility. After you respond, you see whether you had any errors, and where the errors were. Often the errors come in the form of reversing two adjacent characters.

Though I never had the chance to play lacrosse growing up, I’ve learned to appreciate its speed, largely by trying to photograph it!